We get it, you’re a creature of habit. You’ve been using Final Draft™ or another program for years, maybe even decades, and new things are scary. So why give Arc Studio a shot? Let us present our concise two-point plan to convince you:
- Switching is super easy.
- Arc Studio has a fantastic workflow.
Arc Studio is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Final Draft or its parent company. Final Draft is a registered trademark of its respective owner.
Switching to Arc Studio is super easy
The first thing you’ll notice when you start writing a script in Arc Studio is that you’re not noticing anything. That’s because the basic script-writing features and formatting are industry standard. Compare the two scripts below. Can you tell which is Final Draft and which is Arc Studio?
(If you can’t tell, we’re not saying.) Your scene headings are scene headings, your dialogue is dialogue, and you use Return and Tab to switch between elements. You can also use keyboard shortcuts, like CMD + 1 to change the element to a scene heading, CMD +2 to make it an action paragraph, etc. (We’ve also added some great shortcuts like CMD + K , which gives you access to all the shortcuts.)
But maybe you’ve already started writing your script in Final Draft. It’s probably too late to switch to Arc Studio, right? Wrong. (You probably guessed that.) You can import a Final Draft file into Arc Studio. You can also export an Arc Studio script as a Final Draft file if you want.
Arc Studio has a great workflow
Okay, but just because you can easily migrate to Arc Studio doesn’t necessarily mean you should. But you should. And that’s because Arc Studio approaches screenwriting differently. You can think of Final Draft more like Microsoft Word, and Arc Studio more like Google Docs. Our cloud-based approach has a lot of advantages.
In Final Draft, every time you save a new draft of the script you get a new file to keep track of. Things get even more complicated if you email files to your collaborators. Different versions on different computers can lead to possible confusion. Let’s compare that to what looking at all your drafts is like in Arc Studio:
In Arc Studio, all your drafts of a script are accessible within the app. And since they’re all in the same app, you can do things like compare what’s changed between different drafts and use Revert Mode to bring things you cut in an old draft back into your current draft.
Everything in Arc Studio is automatically saved and being tracked in the background, so you never have to hit ‘Save’ and you can’t forget to do anything. Did you forget to track changes? No, you didn’t, because with Arc Studio you can compare your current draft to the previous draft (or any of your past drafts) and mark what’s changed.
Since everything is automatically saved, you never have to “Save As,” and when you’re ready to file a draft you just take a snapshot. We call it a snapshot because it permanently captures the state of your document at the time it’s made. It’s a milestone in your project that you want to keep around for future reference. When you give a snapshot a color, we call it a Revision.
Arc Studio also creates Autosaves. These are snapshots automatically made every time you stop writing for ten minutes. They’re all accessible in your ‘Full history’ in the left sidebar.
Plus, Arc Studio lets you create Alternate Drafts to try new things in private that won’t affect your main draft. When you’re ready, you can share your changes with your collaborators and integrate the good parts of your new approach into your script.
(For a more detailed look at how Arc Studio handles all your drafts and changes, check out our guide.)
We could go on and on, but we’ll just mention Arc Studio’s live collaboration. You can invite a collaborator by sending them a link or entering their email address.
(And how could we forget our AI Research Assistant that lets you ask questions in the app and creates and titles a research note with that information attached to your script.)
You’ve probably heard enough for now, but when you’re ready you should also check out how Arc Studio’s Plot Board which lets you break your story easily, tag all your beats with color-coded story elements, and then gives you access to all your outline information as you’re writing your script so you don’t have to switch between apps.